I grew up using Windows. Our first family computer, which we had for a few years, ran Windows XP, a great version of Windows. Throughout my school years, I mostly used Windows computers, although recently, in my sophomore year, we started using Mac computers. For a long time, I thought Windows would be beneficial throughout my life. But now, I'm reconsidering… sort of.

But first…

I owned two laptops, both running Windows. My first laptop was an Acer TravelMate P214-52 G back in 2020, and my second and most recent laptop was an Acer Extensa 215-21G. I won’t go through the whole lot in terms of specifications, but long story short, I had a small budget at the time to buy another laptop, and freshman me decided to go through Facebook and search for laptops and went with it. Their offer was decent for the time, around P19K.

Since then, I kept using my second laptop as my primary laptop. While in the early days, I still use my TravelMate, now as secondary, it soon became a fad and it just became a thing on the shelf.

Until… around early October, I decided to dust off the laptop for migration of stuff. It hosted almost four years of stuff I did back in the online marketing work, as well as my gaming works around the time. The plan was I back up the majority of the files, and then we would call it there. But oh how wrong I was.

As I was progressing with the backup, I wanted to find a way to make use of this again. It just so happens that it was around the time I got introduced to the world of Linux, courtesy of the Steam Deck from Valve. Without comparing to Windows, it runs well. Sure there might be some quirks in and out, but, it functions well as a gaming handheld, and believe it or not, a desktop device.

So… what if I transform one of our laptops to Linux?

And this is where the experiment began.

I have a tough choice which laptop should I convert to Linux? But in the end, we went with my old laptop mine, you guessed it, the TravelMate.

But then, there is one more question.

What Linux distro are you going to use?

I was like, huh?

So I searched for Linux distros, and there were so many, I couldn’t even decide.

So I asked one of the prominent people in the coding world, and one person whose name is Naomi, gave me recommendations depending on the level of stuff. And I went with one of Linux's first baby steps distro, as she called it: Linux Mint.

Now, with that settled, I made sure some settings were configured on my laptop before proceeding with the installation, it took a little while for it to install, but I did it. Linux Mint has officially replaced Windows on my laptop after almost four years of it being on my hard drive.

And now with that done…

How was it?

Well, it feels like I have a brand-new machine.

No, seriously, it feels like I bought the machine again in 2020.

Now sure, there are things on Windows, that are either I cannot or limited on Linux, but for the purposes of office work, I’m quite okay with it.

In fact, Google Chrome, which runs like trash on Windows, runs well on Linux. I’m not joking, somehow it likes it.

Now, you are thinking…

Does that mean you are using this laptop more?

For office work and coding-related, yes.

For full-on hard stuff, not really.

Don’t forget, I still have my lone Windows laptop on me, so don’t expect me to go full-on Linux for quite some time.

But hey, it's been such a positive change that it will forever be noted in my book as, the one thing I never thought I do, but I did.